Brian Mackey: Wishing for George Washington on the big screen

It’s high time George Washington got his due in the way our culture does best — it’s time for a biopic.

Brian Mackey

Think of George Washington. What comes to mind?

The staid face on the dollar bill? Wooden teeth? Chopping down a cherry tree and coming clean about it?

Ron Chernow’s new biography explodes these banalities. “Washington: A Life” makes the father of our democracy into a flesh-and-blood human being.

This Washington has faults and virtues and remarkable reserves of self-discipline.

He was also a bad mother.

It’s high time he got his due in the way our culture does best — it’s time for a George Washington biopic.

Obsessive readers of this column (hi, Mom) will recall that every year before the Fourth of July, I get an urge to read a book on U.S. history: “Founding Brothers,” “1776,” that sort of thing.

I’m not saying I always get through these books before the Fourth — or ever, as they range in size from hearty doorstops to wheel chocks suitable for securing a 747.

But “Washington” has been relentlessly compelling, with vivid scenes showing a man of action belied by the stoic, placid face we know from portraits.

In an early battle of the French and Indian War, our hero was one of the few surviving officers in a unit of 1,000 men that suffered hundreds and hundreds of casualties.

“With exceptional pluck and cool-headedness, young George Washington was soon riding all over the battlefield. Though he must have been exhausted, he kept going from sheer willpower and performed magnificently amid the horror,” Chernow writes.

During the battle, four bullets ripped his clothes and hat.

“Because of his height, he presented a gigantic target on horseback, but again he displayed unblinking courage and a miraculous immunity in battle,” Chernow writes. “When two horses were shot from under him, he dusted himself off and mounted the horses of dead riders.”

On top of all this, Washington was recovering from a nasty case of dysentery — symptoms include “violent diarrhea.”

“He was still so weak that when he mounted his horse the next morning, he had to strap on cushions to ease his painful hemorrhoids,” Chernow writes.

Perhaps that last detail could be glossed over on the big screen, but the rest of it would make for thrilling cinema.

There were reports three years ago that Nicholas Meyer was writing a screenplay based on Washington’s life. (His past credits include “The Human Stain,” “The Prince of Egypt” and “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.”) But there has been little word since then.

It’s not as though Hollywood doesn’t see a market for this kind of film.

Mel Gibson’s “The Patriot,” about an American planter whose long-dormant inner warrior is awakened when a vicious British officer kills one of his sons, was a big hit a decade ago. And this is a year in which no less than three movies about Abraham Lincoln are in various states of production.

“The Conspirator,” about the trial of Mary Surratt, the woman who allegedly sheltered assassination plotters, was in theaters earlier this year.

Steven Spielberg’s long-awaited “Lincoln,” starring Daniel Day-Lewis as the 16th president, is slated for release in December 2012.

And even “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” is under way, with a release set for June 22, 2012. (The IMDB plot summary is worth the price of admission: “President Lincoln’s mother is killed by a supernatural creature, which fuels his passion to crush vampires and their slave-owning helpers.” Cha-ching.)

Lincoln and Washington are rightly honored as uniquely important to the success of America.

With all this attention being lavished on Lincoln the Savior, can’t we spare a reel for Washington the Father?